


another lie from the front lines

by ingeniousmacabre



Category: Figure Skating RPF, Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drift Compatibility, F/M, Jaeger Pilots, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), aggressive pining and mutual non-romance, as per usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 18:40:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16540022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ingeniousmacabre/pseuds/ingeniousmacabre
Summary: It varies; war takes something from everyone, and consequences do not ask for permission.





	another lie from the front lines

 

 

_“I no longer pay attention to the world ending._

_It has ended for me many times, and began again in the morning.”_

_— Nayyirah Waheed_

 

* * *

 

For what it's worth, there are many, many things they don’t advertise about the Jaeger Program.

The mind is a living thing, on its own, and the drift is as unnatural as the circumstances that have birthed it; _collateral damage_ was the term. Was what the rangers half-joked about in misty locker rooms, or in line at the caf. As they passed by the occasional unconscious body slumped by the vending machine, by the simulation room, by the light of dawn after an attack. Rangers, scattered about the Shatterdome like half-empty shells, firmly wedged between life and something only like it. Collateral damages would be why a comrade hadn’t shown up for drills, why some cadets don’t come back after their third extended run at the drift. Why the bunkers are as good as catacombs.

It varies; war takes something from everyone, and consequences do not ask for permission.

But children of war don’t give special names to these realities—collateral damages, as they were, aren't so much _undesirable_ as they are unspoken, unfortunate. Unpredictable. From Chan's compulsive shakiness that has rendered him unfit to pilot, to White and Davis’ early retirement from the program, the words _honourably discharged due to undisclosed reasons_ at the tip of everyone's tongue, never quite managing to form. Some people live with it more visibly than others.

It doesn’t matter how it manifests; no one is exempt.

Collateral damages _,_ Scott thinks, and it is painful to call it that, pretty much unbearable to have those cursed words rattle about in his chest every goddamn time he remembers; his heart seizing, his breathing catching on the frayed ends of half-memories while he's picking out unreasonably expensive avocados at the grocery. It assaults him at inconvenient times (when it’s not a constant hum of white noise and sensations, of phantom touches and the scent of the stupid lotion she always used, or the ghost of a laugh he had lived with for eighteen years), but what’s new?

If this is the price he pays for retirement, he thinks it’s a steal. (He doesn’t let himself think otherwise.)

He’s sleeping in on a Saturday when it happens. The shrill ringing of his phone, an unidentified caller, but he knows those numbers, has them inscribed at the back of his mind from the last decade. He picks up.

“It’s a weekend, Patch. It’s my day off. This better be good,” he groans, throwing an arm over his eyes even as he dreads what this call could possibly be about. Shards of sunlight have entered his bedroom, and a vision of green eyes comes up, unbidden. He is suddenly cranky.

“ _Allo, Moir_ ,” the voice says at the other end, and he curses the way he kind of maybe misses Patch. “ _Have_ _you seen the news?_ "

“Eh? I’m not even awake yet,” he grumbles, and based on tone alone, silently hopes the bad news is bearable.

“ _The TV. Turn on your TV_ ,” Patch tells him. Somehow, he already knows. Even before he sits down in his living room to watch the world fall apart again, the term "breaking news” never having been more appropriate _._ He goes straight to his kitchen afterwards and fixes himself a glass of whiskey, a little past nine-thirty.

Well, it could be worse. He’s dreamt of worse.

They collect him within five hours, the helicopter landing on his Ilderton backyard with remarkable precision, before he sees Marie-France step out, hair blowing all over her face. One look at his backpack and she raises her eyebrows.

“Is that all?”

“Not really expecting it to be a long stay,” he replies, and if he sounds like he's being cocky about his abilities to end another apocalypse, he thinks he’s earned the right to be.

The truth is, he has a bad feeling about all of this. Perhaps things won’t go the way he expects it to this time. Perhaps he’s run out of luck, even as one-half of the world’s top Jaeger pilots. Perhaps he’ll finally die, this time. He ignores the surge of adrenaline at the thought, doesn’t want to call it what it is, but he knows. Has known, for two years; he’s just always been good at denial.

But he has to admit: he’s missed this family. There’s no better way to go.  


* * *

 

The Shatterdome is just like he remembers it.

A testament to humanity’s stubborn insistence on surviving, he cannot help the smile that stays on his face the moment he steps foot inside again. First time in two years, and the feeling is...

“You miss it, no?” Patch says, ever perceptive, even as they’ve walked these halls a million times over.

“Yeah,” he says, and he’s surprised by how much he means it. “Yeah, I do."

He takes it all in, makes little mental notes of how the floor looks more polished, has it always been this shiny? Has it always been this small, and have the fumes always been this acrid? He waves at a few old-timers, records a few new faces. The Shatterdome does not sleep, not with the recurrent attacks they’ve been getting ( _once a week_ , Scott thinks, and he can already feel it in his bones, the drain of the comeback, the pain, the exhaustion, and God, he has missed this). It shows: the busyness is contagious, he can feel his skin soak up the buzz, the invincibility. He feels like he’s eighteen and immortal. It’s intoxicating. If he's grinning like a fool and and feeling electric, he doesn't care.

_You’ve never been great at compartmentalizing,_ says a voice in his head, and it sounds suspiciously like her, eyes bright and teasing, always her, tainting everything.

_(Collateral damages_ , he thinks, but this one is all him, bitter and bleeding. It has taken him twenty-eight years of existence to learn that hearts do not belong on sleeves, but sometimes, one is born in unfortunate circumstances.)

He studies his surroundings instead; they’ve created a new repair dock, and there are a few Jaegers he’s not familiar with. Patch tells him all about the new Mark VII Jaegers, and then—

“Is she still alive?”

“Eh, no,” Patch replies, without skipping a beat. "Not exactly."

That’s not the answer Scott expected. “What do you mean ‘no’, I’m not gonna pilot—"

“There she is,” Patch suddenly says, and they stop in front of _her._

Scott gasps. _Winter Riptide_ stands before him, a decade of history written on three-hundred feet of mechanical muscle. But where there used to be white and blue, the silver-stained alloys and cold, light silhouettes, there is now an unmistakable maroon splashing across the torso, and black and navy hues of new machinery, entwined almost violently all over the _Riptide_ ’s original musculature—

“She looks… different,” Scott comments quietly.

Later, he is told that she is, quite different. Their last mission ( _God, had it been two years? Had it been that long?_ ) had left only the shell of the _Riptide_ and a few limbs to spare, and Engineering had to modify it quite extensively; she’s no longer the _Winter Riptide_ , but she remains unnamed, because:

“You get to name her, of course!” Sam says in that thick French accent, eyes alight with undertones of knowing exactly where this statement leads to. “Well, you and—you know. You _both_ can name her."

“What d’you mean?” comes out strangled, _because_.

“Didn’t—Oh, Patrice didn't say?” Sam replies, and Scott feels the ground fall from under him.

* * *

The second end of the world does not arrive on horseback and trumpets.

It doesn’t so much “arrive” as it creeps in on humanity's collective subconscious: first was the Southern breach, a computational error in the face of humanity’s first victory—supposedly the _only_ victory necessary—in the Kaiju war. A decade later, that breach was collapsed, and humanity had celebrated that ten-year, near-death experience with unprecendented world peace.

But three years later, another breach had opened. And another, and another one after that, until war ceased to be less of a situation, and more of a permanent state. Breaches—unwanted portals—cropping up all over the Pacific and Atlantic, bleeding out monsters too fast for mankind to keep up with.

And so, extinction was not, as theorists and mathematicians had predicted, a single event. It was a gradual, growing understanding that things are now different, and perhaps may never be the same again: statistics flashed across screens, death like wildfire spreading across continents, across years. Categories 3 through 8, _Fifteen hundred lives were claimed,_ the news said, _from the most recent attack._ Millions displaced, crowds of people moving, shifting, trying to find home on a planet that is, slowly, deliberately, being taken from them. Humanity coming to terms with a million different narratives, a thousand ways to accept defeat. _This is the end_ , the numbers say. _This is finally the end._

And then, the Jaeger Program was reborn.

Desperation called for drastic measures, and what was once considered a brave path towards glory evolved into a mandatory exercise in stalling extinction. At the world’s agreement, the Jaeger Program started to select only the best and brightest minds, to train at a young age to operate the world’s last shot at survival: Jaegers. The machines themselves became bigger, stronger, infinitely more powerful out of necessity. Their pilots had to be of the same caliber as well.

And it worked.

Slowly, through the decades, what was once a losing war started to stabilize. Win after win, breach after breach, humanity inched towards hope and survival. And the rangers—the best, the brightest, the saviours of humanity—took their place in history as gods, once more.

Of course, every war has its casualties.

The drift—the neural bridge required for two pilots to share the mental load of operating a Jaeger—came at a cost. The larger the Kaiju, the greater the Jaeger needed to defeat it, the stronger the drift must be for its pilots.

And with strong drifts came strange consequences.

Scott knows this, _has_ known it for the better part of two decades. You don’t get to rise as one-half of the world’s most decorated Jaeger pilots by forgetting what it takes to survive (rather, what survival takes from you). He practically grew up a ranger, doesn’t even know what it’s like _not_ to be one, for Christ’s sakes.

But it had been two years already, twenty-three months if he’s being picky about it, and _he’s not_ , he’s not being picky about it, not overthinking it, _he really isn’t,_ a stubborn voice in his head unconvincingly echoes. It’s just that, this is _her._ And maybe it’s the collateral damages speaking, maybe it’s years of being exposed to her in the drift like no intimacy could ever replicate, maybe it’s the shared trauma of feeling loss and pain and victory always through another person, with another person, _always with her,_ but by God _,_ he is not ready. Not yet.

(Maybe not ever, but he doesn’t want to think about that.)

He wants to blame the drift, wants to blame eighteen years of conditioning and training and being single-minded in his goal to not let the entire fucking human race down. But the truth is, there’s a part of the pain that has always belonged to him. Him and his stupid, idiotic, immature choices.

So he resigns himself to waiting for something he knows he will never have. God knows, it’s what he deserves.

* * *

When Tessa Virtue gets the call from Marie-France, there is a full minute that she stands in her living room in Toronto, unspeaking. Marie lets her, gives her the silence that she takes for herself, if nothing else.

“I—I’m sorry, could you repeat that, please?"

Her voice sounds soft, even to her ears, belying the shrill white noise that his name has just triggered. _Scott,_ and all at once she’s in Illderton, she’s in Taiwan, then she’s in the middle of the Pacific. She’s on the tree in his childhood backyard before his first bone-breaking fall, she’s with his dad, fixing the carburetor. She’s in Manila, she’s in the simulator room, she’s in the Shatterdome hangar. She’s with him, ten years old on his first day at the Defense Corpse Training Academy. She’s with him at the medbay, looking at herself unconscious on the bed in the white-washed, antiseptic room. Always with him. Him, always. Marie-France’s words pass her completely

“ _Tessa? My dear, are you there?"_

Hope, bright and chilling and unmistakable, seizes her heart.

She’s going to throw up.

_Oh no._

But she says yes to Marie-France anyway. She is a strong woman and there’s an apocalypse to fix; their mess can wait.

* * *

 

He calls her, later that evening.

She knows it’s him before she picks up, because that’s what happens when you drift with someone for ten years, and train with them for twenty, and love them for just as long, if not longer.

( _She will often wonder, in the secret of her thoughts, what Engineering would have to say about all the intricate ways she knows him. You can’t replace hearts like machines and engine parts._ )

She picks up only on the third ring, hesitates for a split second before placing the phone to her ears.

“Hello?” For a moment, no one answers, and for a moment she thinks maybe she’s mistaken—

“ _Tess."_

It’s not a question, and even less of a greeting. It sounds rough, raw. Maybe she’s hearing things that aren't there, it's her collateral damages speaking, her own longing twisting her senses... but she could swear that syllable sounds about as hollow as the last two years.

She is definitely going to throw up.

"Hello," she hears herself say, but does not recognize her own voice. There's a breath on the other end, the rush of an exhale. Unconsciously, she does the same.

" _Tess, hey. Hey kiddo. How are you?_ "

"I'm—" _I miss you._ "I'm good. I'm great, um, h—how are you?"

" _Never been better_." She can hear both the smile in his response and the lie it wraps around.

"Yeah?"

" _Yeah_."

"That's—that's good to hear. It's... good to hear your voice."

_I miss you, I miss you, I miss you terribly._

Her ears strain to hear and really listen, even as she waits out his pause. By now, she has gravitated towards the far end of her hallway, her back against the wall; she needs all the support she can get.

" _I miss you too, kiddo_."

She does not cry, because twenty years of conditioning will do that to you. But she does lean much more on the wall, her forehead coming to press on the off-white wallpaper, her heart a reckoning in her chest.

_Oh no_ , is right. _Oh no_ , is all she has.

And because she has never known what to do with this intensity, has never been taught how to deal with the messiness of emotions (there are no modules for falling in love, no trainings for handling desire and its aftermath), she does what she does best: get right back to business.

"Did you see the news?"

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i didn't mean to write this i swear i don't know where it came from it literally just popped out im sorry. title from "mars" by sleeping at last. one-shot only because oh my god i am not ready for this kind of commitment.
> 
> forever disclaimer: i don't write RPF but TS are an exception because they're TS.
> 
> comments are better than the five shots of tequila i wish i were consuming rn. help ya girl out ;)
> 
> luv u ol,
> 
> —Katie


End file.
